The end of a particular stylistic period, in film as in the other arts, is
often marked by a few masterpieces whose dizzying complexity seems to
carry the style as far as it can be taken. Just as the end of the Romantic
symphony is marked by Mahler's last few works in that form, and the
end of Hollywood silent cinema is marked by films like
Sunrise
and
Street Angel
, so at the end of the
film noir
period come the two ultimate examples of the form,
Touch of Evil
and
Kiss Me Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly
is also in many ways, the ultimate film of 1950s America, with its themes
of speed, money, power, sex, and the atomic bomb intertwined in a tale of
a detective who becomes an extortionist in an attempt to turn a chance
discovery into personal gain.

The film's night-for-night opening sets the tone: A woman dressed
only in a coat appears out of the darkness on a lonely highway. She forces
a car driven by Mike Hammer to stop, and as they drive one is aware of the
loud drone of the engine and of the disorienting darkness, in which the
disembodied lights of distant cars and the white lines of the road are
virtually our only co-ordinates. What is established here is worked out in
detail during the whole remainder of the film, in a soundtrack which uses
a variety of noises of violent intensity and intrusiveness, and in imagery
which uses light/dark contrasts utterly to undermine stability.

Hammer, happening on a plot involving the theft and attempted sale of
fissionable material, does not know these specifics until the
film's end. He guesses only that he has lucked on to
"something big,"
and that "a piece of something big has got to be something
big." He follows his thread through a befuddling labyrinth of
bizarre characters, common in Spillane's detective fiction, which
finds its visual equivalent in the film in a panoply of foreground
objects, bizarre shifts of camera perspective, and highly disjunctive
editing. The camera follows Hammer down a dark street; suddenly a brightly
lit newsstand comes into the foreground, utterly transforming the space.
We see a beachfront fight from eye-level, and then cut to an extreme high
angle. In many compositions, oblique camera angles combine with cluttered
foregrounds to produce oddly asymmetrical spaces. The effect of these
devices is to place the viewer in a world utterly different from that of
Ford, or Walsh or Hawks. In their films, paradigms of the classical
Hollywood style, the consistency of the relationship between earth and
sky, or between the bodies and body-movements of the characters, serves as
a kind of fixed basis against which all deviations of movement, behavior,
and image may be judged. In
Kiss Me Deadly
, on the other hand, we are plunged from the opening images into a world
utterly without ground, without stability, without predictability, in
which the only constant is the ability of the image to suddenly transform
itself into another, very different one. Space, and the objects that fill
it, are presented as physically malleable; there are no absolutes. The
noir
themes of violence, paranoia, and despair, and the visual motifs that
accompany them, are here carried to a visionary extreme that becomes a
total world-view. This is a realm in which there can be firm basis for
moral judgements, and if the film ultimately renders a negative judgment
on Hammer's self-serving quest, it does so more because of the
actual ugly consequences than because of any fundamental belief.

In a universe without belief, one lives for, and celebrates, the senses.
Aldrich, and A. I. Bezzerides in his brilliant script, present the ethos
of 1950s America quite brilliantly. Nick, Hammer's Greek auto
mechanic, uses the phrase "Va-va-voom—pow!" to
express his attraction to Hammer's fast cars and his interest in
picking up "a couple of Greek girls"—and yet, in that
phrase, the film's whole plot finds epigrammatic expression.
Fascinated with speed and sex, the men who pursue both often wind up
endangered, injured, or dead; Nick's "pow" is not
only the thrill of moving at maximum speed, and the thrill of orgasm, but
also a forecast of the explosion that ends the film, itself only a
hyperbolization of the film's earlier small explosions. The
script's mythological and biblical references contrast a modern
world without values and a heroic past whose heroism is now rendered, in
the fragments of fables we hear, as empty actions almost devoid of
meaning.

In one of the film's many small brilliant touches, a boxing
promoter sees Hammer and tries to get him to bet on his latest fighter.
Hammer suggests that the promoter will ultimately have the fighter throw
his big fight, as he had in fact done in the past, because there's
more gambling money to be made that way. The promoter replies, "not
this one." Later, near the film's end, Hammer, drugged with
"truth serum," is tied to a bed and interrogated; he soon
manages to outwit and murder his captors. During this section, we hear the
sound of the big fight on the radio; at the end, the fighter who had been
winning suddenly loses, presumably "throwing" it. This is
more than simply another of the venal betrayals that dot the film; it is
an example of the way that the film's quest, for speed, sex, and
power, must, since it is a quest without moral basis, ultimately turn back
on itself, annihilating all the seekers.